"Mrs. T" gets ID'd

Can't be a real moth, says Laurie. Wyldthang calls it " pretty freaky". "Spooky", someone on another site called it.

That's this visitor, that I photographed on my garden wall, last August, and posted to the blog a few days ago:

Well, yes, it is strange.

I hadn't gotten around to IDing it, nor even finding where it fitted. I've been doing that all this evening (and early morning).

It is, as far as I can figure out, a Morning Glory Plume Moth, Emmelina monodactyla, and is fairly common across the US and Canada, and in the UK. It turns up on a database of species in the Lulu Island bog, just across the river from us. Some people have called it the "T" moth, which is the name I gave it for my own use. Logical, I guess.

I found eleventy-two photographs of Emmelina, but very little information. I read, over and over, that the Plume Moths have unusual wings. (As if I hadn't noticed.) They are like long "spars", or shafts, two in the front wings, three in the back. Long feathery "plumes" trail out from these shafts when they are open, but at rest, the moth rolls up the front wing and hides the back wings underneath. Wikipedia says,

"Often they resemble a piece of dried grass, and may pass unnoticed by potential predators even when resting in exposed situations in daylight."

On BugGuide, I found a photo of this moth with the feathers exposed:

Photo by Dick Wilson, under a Creative Commons license.

The caterpillars of this moth eat morning glories, I would infer from the name, but the only site I found that mentioned their diet named field bindweed, Convolvulus arvensis. Of which we have far too much around here; I hope all her eggs hatch. And have big appetites.

But I could find no photos of her caterpillars. I guess I'll just have to keep an eye out for them this summer.